Intel Itanium Montecito won't have x86 support

The question why it has dropped x86 support from the upcoming Itanium 'Montecito' processor was answered by Intel with a riddle.

Cnet uncovered the x86 hardware loss by searching through a new Montecito reference manual published by Intel. The manual does reveal that the transistors present in older versions of Itanium to handle old x86 code have been scrapped in favor of a pure software replacement - the IA-32 Execution Layer. As many of you know, Intel has long championed Itanium's ability to run legacy 32-bit applications in addition to newly ported 64-bit EPIC applications.